Island of a Thousand Mirrors (9 page)

*   *   *

Mala hums as she reaches to pull dead leaves off the airborne bromeliads. One hand
is curved around her belly, which swells under her sari skirt. Her breasts are heavy.
She feels full of sap, like a plant with a seedling buried deep in the intricate unknown
passageways of her body. Her feet are swollen, tender. The thongs of her rubber slippers
stretched painfully over her arches have made her forswear footwear.

It is dusk, but feels like dawn. There is a freshness in the air, a chorus of bullfrogs
singing from among the mud-rooted, sky-reaching purple lotuses of her pond. Only the
silken whisper of bats’ wings across the darkening sky give evidence of day’s end.

Close by, Poornam pulls the garden hose over her shoulder, heavy as an anaconda, showering
the thirsty foliage. Loamy earth mixes with water, mud rises between their far-spread
toes. Mala exclaims, “I think the baby likes that! She pushed. Just here. I felt it!”
She takes Poornam’s wet hands and places them palm flat on her belly. The girl laughs,
shakes her black curls. Yes! She, too, feels it! That unexplained, unexpected life
unfurling in the cave of Mala’s body. Poornam’s hands leave small prints on the stretched
skin of Mala’s stomach. They look into each other’s eyes, a sudden aching devotion
between woman and girl.

*   *   *

Yet at this time, there are also strange signs and forebodings. A lifelong vegetarian,
Mala is now taken by the fierce longing to taste the unknown flesh of animals. Anuradha
is sent forth. He drives across town to where the imam recites the call to prayer,
passes men in white skullcaps, women looking out from under the ends of their saris.
He follows the thin stream of glinting blood to the butcher shop, where the skinless
hanging carcasses assail his senses. Covering his nose with a handkerchief, he bargains
for the flesh of animals he has never tasted. The sharp-eyed Muslim tugs dripping
red organs off the hooks behind him, bounces them on the table, wraps the various
pieces in newspaper and hands them to Anuradha, who, arms full of sodden newspaper,
stumbles out and homeward.

Mala consumes these organs with curiosity and at night cries over the unfamiliar guilt
of eating animals. Yet as the baby grows, she longs for even more intimate slices
of animal flesh. She dreams of consuming the kidneys and hearts of chickens, the eyeballs
of goats, the thick-skinned and slippery livers of cows. In the kitchen, Poornam cooks
the offerings, her own Hindu aversion to flesh buried under a mountain of love for
her mistress.

Fed to repletion, Mala’s belly grows rapidly, but the rest of her stays as sharp as
ever, like a thin child wearing a pillow under her dress, playing at being pregnant.

When Anuradha comes home, there is dinner. And then bed, where enclosed in the frothy
kingdom under their mosquito net, they conspire their baby’s future.

He: “Doctor, lawyer, engineer!”

She: “No! Nothing so boring as all that. She will be an artist.”

He: “Like Keyt?”

She: “No, not modern. More in the style of whoever painted the Sigiriya maidens.”

He laughs, delighted: “You mean completely unknown and unsung?”

She: “No, fabulously talented, able to make the rock breathe and live.”

They giggle. Hands reaching for each other. Outside on her pallet in the living room,
Poornam stirs in her sleep, mutters indecipherable words and unconscious prophecies.

*   *   *

July, a month of stifling, breathless heat. Heat that radiates as if the powers-that-be
have dropped a woolen blanket over Colombo, attempting to muffle the screams that
are coming. We stay inside, watch rounded drops of sweat run like mercury along our
skins. Only the circulating rumor of impending disaster causes the slightest of breezes.

I slip away into the blue room to meet Shiva. We throw jacks. He goes first and I
watch him, unaware that the fluency and fluidity of that motion will stay with me
for years, will become the mark by which I measure all masculine movement. When it
is my turn, I throw with a like accuracy, but his fingers suddenly steal out, wrap
about my own wrist. “Not like that,” he whispers. We are each stilled, silent. We
have touched rarely, especially in these past few months when we have become somehow
aware of each other in a different way. A way that makes me watch him secretly as
he plays cricket or bends over his books. I have seen him watching me, too, with the
breath caught in his throat. Now I see his pupils expand, the black space blossoming
into the mushroom-like brownness. It makes me instantly breathless, as if I had swum
far out and looked back to see no land. And then his lips are by my ear and each hair
on my body stands upright. The shotgun crack of breaking glass. Screaming rising from
outside the gate. We are torn apart, fleeing from the room, each to our respective
families.

In the house, Amma grasps me hard across the upper arm, shakes me. “Where were you?
Where?” she hisses. But there is also relief in her breaking voice. And then, the
inhuman sounds coming from outside take away her attention.

We lock ourselves up in the house. It is impossible to know what is happening outside
the wall. We are just grateful to be together, to be at home and not out on the streets.
We don’t know what is happening until much later. But this is what happened. First
the streets were full of open-bedded trucks carrying red-eyed men who sang rude songs
at the tops of their voices. They passed sloshing arrack bottles from hand to hand
like riotous university students on a class trip. But in this case, other things also
were passed from hand to hand. Knives, metal poles, machetes, dusty hoes, large white
cans full of incendiary gasoline Hundreds of men stalked the streets, headed arrow
straight to the residences of Tamil families. They dragged out fathers and mothers,
girls and grandmothers, ripped clothing, shattered bone, and cut through flesh. They
burned homes and houses, bodies and businesses. They set fires on front lawns, threw
in furniture and children over the wailing of mothers. They committed the usual atrocities
in the usual ways, but here was something unexpected and incongruous. In their earth-encrusted,
calloused fingers, they clutched clean white pages, neatly corner-stapled. Census
accounts, voting registrations, pages detailing who lived where and most important,
who was Tamil, Burgher, Muslim, or Sinhala. And in these lists was revealed precision
and orchestration in the midst of smoky, charred flesh–smelling chaos.

*   *   *

In the Wellawatte house, we huddle in the back bedroom as twice the mob comes to slam
its heavy fist against the front door. Each time, a fiery-eyed Sylvia Sunethra flings
it open, fixes the men with her wrath. Unquavering, as if blind to the machetes and
broken bottles, she shouts, “What is this knocking and knocking to break down my door?
Such shameless behavior I have never seen.”

The foremost man, white pages clutched in one hand, a curving fish knife in the other,
steps forward. “A Tamil family is living here, no?” Sylvia Sunethra fixes him with
a gaze that does something to him, reminds him that before this business with the
Tamils, there were other, older differences, distinctions of blood and caste that
would have made his ancestors drop their eyes before her.

“Tamils. What nonsense. This is a Sinhala household. Only I and my family are here.
No bloody Tamils.”

The men, shamed by the righteous old Sinhala lady, turn away. They will pursue their
dark deeds in other, more convivially acquiescent households.

Sylvia Sunethra closes the door, leans against it. We, her terrified family, emerge
from our hiding places. “See? What did I tell you? You only have to talk to these
idiots with a little chili powder on the tongue. Put them in their place.” But her
fingers running through La’s curls are quivering, her bosom rising and falling. “Now
I must go and talk to those Shivalingams.”

She makes her slow, wobbling way up the back staircase, uses her key to enter a kingdom
she has not seen for years. Inside, the late afternoon light lies indolent; there
is silence and a thick cloud of fear. “For a moment, I thought they had already fled,”
she tells us later. “But I stayed there very quietly and then slowly they came out.”
Shivalingam men and women from behind the heavy furniture, Shivalingam children from
beneath the dusty spaces under beds, until Sylvia Sunethra is surrounded. Then she
makes promises, gives reassurances, returns to us and for three days turns away the
mob by the sheer force of her will.

When night falls, she sends Alice creeping upstairs, bearing rice and dhal, some okra
pods, the last of the coconut sambal. For these three days, no cooking smells drift
down to us, no film songs fill the air, no jabbering of Tamil is heard. It is as if
the rooms above us lie empty and haunted already.

*   *   *

If we could have entered the dead telephone lines that day, followed them across the
burning city, down to our aunt’s quiet bungalow and into her bedroom, this is what
we would have seen. As smoke rises over Galle Road, as muffled screams make their
way over her gate, and though there are still two months to go, our aunt Mala’s belly
is wrenching and twisting. It is the third day of twenty-four-hour curfew and Anuradha,
white faced, fingernails bitten past their quick, has been watching his wife writhe
for the last two days. He says, “The hospital. We have to go.” And Mala, gasping,
“No Anu, please. It’s only the heat. And the baby kicking.” He says, “Alright. I’ll
go and bring the doctor here.” But she can’t allow this. Has terrible visions of what
could happen to him out there, in the unseen nightmare beyond their gate.

He carries her to their old yellow Volkswagen, the tight, battered Bata slippers dangling
off her feet. She worries about this, the impropriety of leaving the house in her
house slippers. But then Poornam has pulled open the gate and it is too late to ask
for other, more appropriate shoes. They drive into the lane. A lull in the faraway
shouting, the street festooned in sunlight and birdsong, foliage spilling everywhere,
and for a moment there is normalcy, the sense that they are leaving the house for
a walk along Galle Face Green or Mount Lavinia beach. They turn onto Galle Road; drive
into thick, rolling smoke; glimpse armed men, abandoned cars, looted shops. Mala,
the aching of her womb momentarily shocked still, presses a knuckled hand against
her mouth.

Anuradha whispers, “God,” as the clearing smoke allows them to see. He is wrenching
the wheel around, homeward, when the hand smacks, splay fingered, against the glass
next to Mala’s head. A teenage boy in a torn, stained school uniform. Behind him,
the mob congeals, and the boy, in his terror, scrambles onto the hood of their car.
Through the garnet smears on the windscreen, they see the glint of knives, broken
bottles, machetes. The mob surrounds them completely now and though she cannot see
the men’s eyes, Mala knows that they are expecting sacrifice. Knows that this Tamil
boy in his school uniform, his face squashed against the glass so close to her own,
the open fish mouth, the wide eyes, and that terrible gushing cut on his head, has
been chosen as sacrifice for years of deprivation, broken governmental promises, failed
examinations, and decades of relentless physical labor. And the boy himself, knowing
this, his hands raised to protect his delicate face, does not even beg for mercy.

She hears the door slam. She sees Anuradha push through the men, pull himself onto
the car, his body in front of the boy’s.

She hears his words through her own shuddering sobs. “This child. He has done nothing.
He is no problem for you.”

Her fingers struggle on the lock. She will jump out. They won’t hurt a pregnant woman.
There are greater human laws they will abide by. She is sure of it. Just outside her
window through the dirty glass, a machete is raised, hefted from hand to hand. She
sees the silver gleam of it, sinks low in her seat.

Anuradha negotiating, “I can give you money. Anything. Just let me take this boy and
go.”

The voices, “What have you got to do with this Tamil bastard? These motherfuckers
ruining this country. Think they can take over. Time to teach a lesson they won’t
forget. Crack some heads before they murder us in our beds. Move aside.”

Anuradha turns, wraps his arms around the cowering boy. His eyes search for hers through
the blood-smeared glass. She sees the blade raised and brought down. The flutter of
his lids so familiar. His body jerking and then sagging as it has innumerable times
over hers in the sanctity of their bed. But this time, it is the unnamed boy who receives
his weight, who shrieks the ear-shattering screams of an animal in terror. More blood
than she can imagine, running onto the bright yellow paint of their car. Then a hundred
hands reaching out and pulling him and the screaming boy into their midst.

She is huddled on the floor of the car, arms wrapped about her belly, when the door
is eased open. A voice in Sinhala whispers, “Come, Nona, come with me.” She looks
and sees Alwis, the coconut plucker, slum denizen. “Nona, let us go home now.” His
calloused hands pull her onto the seat and then out of the car.

The mob is gathered in front of the car, a blur of limbs, and the metallic arc of
weapons, but Alwis’s sinewy, coconut tree–clasping arms will not allow her to break
away, throw herself in the midst of the mob, beg for her lover’s life. She is hurried
away. When the smoke has cleared for a moment, she struggles loose, looks back to
see men on the upturned car like flies on a day-old catch, white cans upturned, gushing
gasoline. A roar as the spark ignites, catches, bursts into flame. The men’s voices
roaring and falling in time to the jumping flames. A dancing circle of men. Those
on the periphery pushing forward, curious to see what the center holds. A louder shriek
as a sarong catches a flying cinder and the circle scatters open. And what is it that
my dark aunt sees at that moment? Too grotesque to be revealed surely. Too horrific
to be imagined. But in the name of veracity it must be told: two vaguely human figures,
lurching in an almost comic fashion, garlanded, each, with a flaming tire. Hands bound,
black rubber melting onto skin, red flames dancing skyward, funnels of smoke obscuring
wide open mouths, a glimpse of damaged eye. The swirl of men closes ranks. The scene
is closed off from Mala’s eyes like a book of naughty illustrations slammed shut.
So fast that she almost cannot accept what she has seen. A soft rain of ash is falling,
settling into her hair and skin. At her ear, a steady stream of words. She knows she
must concentrate on this to avoid losing herself. She knows she must walk home now
without allowing what is sheltering within her to pour out like water onto this smoky
street.